One other way to play with these same notions about something
linear and moving through time, the way
a narrative does as opposed to a lyric poem that
stops time and stands at a single moment of feeling,
is through a sequence.
Particularly, if you make a sequence out of lyric poems,
and then arrange them in some way that suggests a story
or suggest a narrative.
And that's what I did in this book of sonnets called Kyrie.
The presumption for all of the sonnets,
is that these are imagined speakers
who could have survived the 1918, 1919 influenza epidemic.
You probably know something about that
now because, there have been a lot of reports in the newspaper
and in the popular journalism about the fact
that the scientists have uncovered a piece of the DNA,
they dug up some bodies out of the permafrost.
So, they now have a sample of it which, one doesn't
know quite how to feel about that.
The epidemic was called the Spanish flu,
and they mark the figures from March 1918, when she was first
diagnosed by army surgeons, that was
right toward the end of World War I.
So, there are all these young men who were gathered together,
in training camps, and army camps,
and they started dying at a rate of about 90 a day,
in Fort Devens Massachusetts.
And, this was very bad for the war effort.
So that was when it first was diagnosed,
and over the course of one year, it
killed upwards of 30 million people, which is more
than any other thing has ever killed in the same time period,
more than any war, any plague, any famine,
and it particularly liked its victims
between the ages of 18 and 40, like most of you.
And, happened very fast.
And this was before the antibiotics,
in fact, antibiotics were developed as an effort
to try to find something that would treat the flu,
should it come back.
So that's the start of the general circumstance
and the war is going on.
I'm just going to read you a little sample,
I'm going to read you 10 of these sonnets.
They're quite loose sonnets, some of them are straight
and have 14 lines, and have iambic pentameter,
and have rhyme, and some of them don't.
They all have the structure of a sonnet, which
is to say they make a turn somewhere
in the course of the piece.
And I think the best way for you to listen to this,
is just to imagine that each one of these speakers
is a different person that will be a recurring
character, that you'll recognize pretty soon.
"When does a childhood end?
Mothers sew a piece of money inside a sock, fathers
unfold a map of the world, and boys go off to war.
That's an end, whether they come back wrapped in the flag
or waving it.
Sister and I, were what they kissed goodbye,
complicit is in the long dream left behind.
On one page willful innocence, on the next,
an army captain riding from the ward with few details
and much regret, a kindness she wouldn't forgive and wouldn't
be reconciled to her soldier lost, or me in my luck
or the petals strewn on the grass,
while the boys still on the playground routing
evil with their little sticks.
To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house,
to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen,
against the grid of the quilt, her hand
seems stitched to the cuff of its sleeve.
Although he wants most urgently, the hand to stroke his head,
although he thinks he could kneel down,
that it would need to travel only inches to brush
like a breath his flushed cheek, he doesn't stir.
All his resolve, all his resources, go to watching her,
her mouth, her hair, a pillow of blackened ferns,
he means to match her stillness bone for bone.
Nearby he hears the younger children cry,
and his aunts, like careless thieves out in the kitchen.
This is the double bed where she'd
been born, bed of her mother's marriage and decline,
bed her sisters also ripened in, bed
that drew her husband to her side, bed of her one child lost
and five delivered, bed indifferent to the many bodies,
bed around which all of them were gathered,
watery shapes in the shadows of the room,
and the bed frail abroad the violent ocean,
the frightened beasts so clumsy and pathetic heaving,
their wet breath against her neck,
she threw off the pile of quilts white face like a moon,
and then entered straight away into heaven.
When it was time to move, he didn't move,
he lay off his mother.
She pushed and pushed, she'd had a stone before,
she wanted a child.
Reaching in, I turned him like a cat.
Rob gave her a piece of kindling wood, she bit right through.
I turned him twice.
Her sisters were all in the house, her brother home again
on leave, in the months to come, in the cities that
would be families, reported their terminals and fled,
volunteers would have to hunt the dying door to door.
It started here, with too many breech and stillborn.
Women who looked 50 not 32.
I marked it childbed fever in my log.
Dear Manny, Pug says, even a year of camp
would not help most of us, so why not now?
Tomorrow we take a train to New York City, board of freight
are there.
You know how the logs are flushed
through the long flume at Hodnetts' Mill,
the stream flooding the sluice, the cut
pine crowding and pushing and rushing,
and then the narrow chute opens onto the pond.
I feel like that once we are out to sea and seeing the world.
I need to say, I've saved a bit, and you should also
have my grandpa's watch.
Tell Fan that I said so.
Keep busy, pray for me, go on with life,
and put your mind to a wedding in the yard."